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2013-02-03

I'm launching Control My Pi Beta today. In just a few lines of Python code you can create a control panel for your project accessible over the Internet. No firewall changes to make, no web servers to set up. Pick up your Raspberry Pi, take it to a friends house or work, school, a club, a coffee shop - connect it to 3G and carry it around or put it in your car - it doesn't matter where it is or what network you're on you'll be able to access your control panel on Control My Pi. It's no ordinary control panel either, every viewer establishes a "push" connection to the server so any update sent from your Raspberry Pi is pushed to every open control panel out there in the world.

If you're really proud of your control panel, and you don't mind anyone pressing buttons, you can make your panel public. It will appear as a link on the front page. (I may need to do something about this if this feature becomes very popular!) If you just want to share your panel with a few people send them a copy of your panel URL.

Instructions, FAQ and documentation are available on the web site plus some examples to get started. More write-ups of Control My Pi projects coming up soon from simple GPIO LED projects to 3G GPS bicycle telemetry systems!

I've got a couple of public examples up and running for you to take a look at. Remember to click the "Push status" button on public panels to start the connection if you want to interact with it. (This is done for you automatically on non-public panels).

Here's a video showing a control panel in action. This is taken from the easycontrol.py example available in the download at Control My Pi. In the background is a Nexus 7 tablet showing a zoom in on the control panel at Control My Pi. In the foreground you can see my Raspberry Pi connected to a breadboard with 4 GPIOs. Two for inputs from the buttons and two for outputs to the LEDs. It's a bit hard to see because of my jumper wires but when I push the hardware button the LED's state changes and this is pushed to the web page. Likewise, when I press a software button the same thing happens.

And here's the small Python script to make this happen: hardware inputs, outputs and multi-user, push status, Internet control panel!

Finally, here's a snapshot of the live dashboard of my 3G GPS bicycle telemetry system. My current position, heading, speed, height and X,Y and Z accelerations are pushed to Control My Pi and then out to anyone watching!